Jim Thompson

Email Jim at jim.thompson@ipulpmedia.com

By Fos the Rat

Well, after a few days, the Great Mother came back. She did not mention gorging herself and neither did anyone else.

Great Mother, "We have gotten very far behind, and our time is almost up. Til, can you come forward and read the remaining cases? If we have time, we will take them up at next year's conference."

Til came forward.

"First, there is the case of the purchasing agent. With an outside accomplice, he conspired to defraud his employer of close to two million dollars. He received a sentence of three years in prison and three years of extended supervision. He was also ordered to make restitution for the funds he stole."

"Second, there is the case of the company employee who increased the price in a bid for land development work. The increase above and beyond the agreed to contract price was to be returned to the employee as a personal kickback for awarding the contract."

"Then there is the case of the company that put itself into bankruptcy in order to reduce its own liabilities. This case is far beyond the ability of us rats to understand, it is so complicated."

"A company across the waters misclassified its exports in order to reduce its tax bill at home. Again, a case so complicated us rats have trouble understanding it."

"These cases are pretty common...an employee conspired with another person to fraudulently create scale weigh tickets in order to divert funds to their own personal accounts. There were over 500 fraudulent scale tickets and a loss of $500,000. The employee received a sentence of nearly six years in prison plus was ordered to pay restitution."

"Lenders are attempting to collect 10s of millions of dollars from a former CEO who did not execute his fiduciary duties in terms of watching out for the welfare of shareholders and other's investments. It appears he did not personally profit from these efforts, but his judgement was so poor that he may be held liable."

"Then there is the employee who stole computers from his company and sold them on eBay!"

"Stop! Stop!" the Great Mother roared. "The Big Things seem to never stop finding ways to be horrible. I don't know what we are going to do.

"Fellow rats, when you go home, if you see any bad behavior on the part of The Big Things, do what you can to stop it, but don't get yourselves hurt. We'll see you next year."

And thus ends another chapter in the sordid affairs of the Big Things. See you next August.

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